‘MIKE NELSON: EXTINCTION BECKONS’

Hayward Gallery, London

”Time is an otherworldly concept and truth an unreliable beast.”
-Mike Nelson

Immersion At Work

Is this a dream? Here we are in the slick, uber-modern Hayward Gallery where cash payments are like yesterday, baby. And the indicia is all bits of paper pinned to noticeboards. And that aesthetic is adhered to throughout. Though it may better be called an anti-aesthetic, a foregrounding of bog-standard plain-ness. A film is projected onto brown plywood boards.

To some, DIY is a punk philosophy about rejecting consumerist culture. To Mike Nelson, it would seem to to have a more literal definition - bodging bits of wood together in sheds while reaching for your bevel. He’s not artist-as-craftsman, posing in a smock, so much as handyman-as-space-creator. The show proudly states it took over thirty builders four months to assemble, leading you to picture them sucking their checks about the right cowboys who’d staged the previous exhibition.

The worst thing you could do at this point would be imagine this is another example of Instragrammable art - works staged as a photo-op for punters to quickly click and share. In fact it’s the very opposite. As Jeremy Deller has said “to be fully appreciated, [this] really is an exhibition that needs to be seen in person.” Nelson himself has pointed out: “my instinct has always been to make immersive works. They should have a spatial aspect but also a psychological effect on the senses.” (And please remember all that while you peruse my inexpert photos.)

And this is a little like the way Abstract Expressionism responded to the prevalence of colour photography, art taking a direction where it couldn’t easily be snapped and captured. Saying art shouldn’t, in a direct physical sense, be too easy to access, it can leave you sounding like an elitist. But the truth is that what’s too easily clicked on is too easily clicked off, and everything passes by in a blur. (The trend for turning already existing artworks into ‘immersive experiences’ is probably a more risible, commercially oriented variant of this.)

There are five environments to explore, all reworkings of installations Nelson has staged elsewhere. ’The Asset Strippers’ places once-familiar agricultural machinery on plinths, the way we present ancient artefacts. No longer connected to their use, we can’t do other than to frame their form, turn them into sculptures. In this way, looking at other people looking at them can be more significant than looking at the machines themselves. The name comes from Nelson buying them from asset sales, and most likely they’d otherwise have been sold for scrap.

Nelson has commented on placing “artefacts cannibalised from the last days of the industrial era in place of the treasures of empire that would normally adorn such halls”. But truth be told this worked better when a fuller version was staged in the ornate, august halls of Tate Britain three years ago.

Memory Merely Flickers

There’s frequent other references to the fallibility of memory. Nelson has mythologised about the Amnesiacs, a biker gang of Gulf War vets who suffer from PTSD flashbacks. (Perhaps based on the Hells Angels being vets of World War Two.) And here we have ’Amnesiac Shrine'. Naturally we never see the gang, only the residue of their actions, as if getting their flashbacks second-hand. And these often take the form of cargo-cult attempts to reassemble the past, a ‘fire’ with red plastic sheeting standing for flames (handily illustrated), objects stuck together in the shape of a motorbike, animal horns as handlebars, and so on.

While the exterior of ’Triple Bluff Canyon’ is a bunker-like building almost entirely buried by sand. It’s very similar to images in Chris Marker’s ’Sans Soleil’ (1983). A film which starts with what looks like young children on a road in Iceland, all bucolic and charming. Then shows us the same space later, after a volcanic eruption, where only the peaks of roofs are discernible from under a covering of black ash. Memory merely flickers, always in danger of being smothered by forgetting.

You can go inside the bunker, after some English queuing, and discover an old-style darkroom. Pictures are hung up to dry, as if resisting the weight of the sand outside. Yet they’re no more comprehensible to us than the machines in ’The Asset Strippers’. That placed foreign objects in a space recognisable to us, while this does the opposite, placing us in a foreign environment - but the result’s the same. It’s like they’re in language which lost its comprehensibility when this space was vacated, and now remain like a residue.

While the first environment we cross, ’I, Impostor’ is like a cross between a very run-down branch of B&Q and a hoarder’s attic. We realise these aren’t random items; everything is prepared, the wood cut into precise shapes, some objects even labelled for assembly. Yet we don’t see any plans for this, they’re placed together as uselessly as those drying photos. It turns out these are the pieces for an installation Nelson once staged, but not for us here. (Though it does, if I’m honest, seem an outsized means of establishing this point.)

The Absence Hits

’The Deliverance and The Patience’ is a jumble of interconnected rooms. Unlike ’Triple Bluff Canyon’ there’s no way to cross them in a linear fashion, you just have to wander and hope for the best, multiple-choice doors jarring with any attempt to form some sort of narrative. I’ve still no idea if I went through them all. They’re stripped back, floors often bare and walls reduced back to beams, and full of archaic objects, bakelite phones and the like.

And what’s through those doors seems entirely unconnected. One’s an old-style travel agents, another a gambling den, another looks like someone slept rough in it, another again is dominated by an occult shrine (again handily illustrated). While the door to each is unique, as if at the same time you’re in a physical space you’re crossing some sort of portal. (Each door squeaks so loud, drawing attention to itself, that it must surely be a deliberate feature.)

Nelson writes on one of those noticeboards of how the links between rooms are more conceptual, like jumping between scenes in a film. And, as you were probably about to say yourself, memory works in a similar way. We remembers incidents in an encapsulatory fashion, like a series of rooms without the connecting corridors, a few roof peaks amid a whole load of blackness. Plus, memory can link together physically apart spaces.

But more than that… What should feel prosaic and straightforward, the instant-hit advent-calendar moment of seeing behind another door, doesn’t at all. The absence hits you as much as any presence. There’s the constant feeling of elusiveness, of missing something.

Reviews mostly talked of reconstructing what happened in those rooms, putting together the clues left us like detectives. Which makes them seem too much like puzzles, waiting to be solved. (And notably the same reviews didn’t offer much of a solution.)

And it would be as easy to read all this as an exercise in nostalgia, a lament for the analogue, hands-on past, an old man shaking his fist at an iCloud. But that isn’t it. Instead it uses the (real or apparent) materiality of the past as a means to convey estrangement. Perhaps its always the past which feels material, becoming solid in hindsight, while the present just passes past us like water through our fingers. Whatever happened back then formed us, made us what we are. And is now inaccessible to us.

There’s something formalist about this whole show, art which is largely about the making of itself. You need to picture it all being put up, the saws going across and nails into those bits of wood. At one point there’s a full reproduction of Nelson’s studio. You could scarcely stress the materiality, the madeness enough.

But this takes us to a paradox. You physically walk through those spaces. You could pick up and move objects should you choose. Yet I often felt like a kind of phantom, an insubstantial being. Despite - or perhaps because of - this being my past. I once answered bakelite phones like those, went to travel agents to buy physical plane tickets. Yet that world I lived through I’m now watching from the outside. It’s the act of rebuilding that world which shows us how disconnected from it we are. (It would be interesting to see how those a couple of generations younger than me reacted to this show.)

Experience, at least the forms of experience which seem formulatory to you, always fall the other side of the line. And so the best way to experience this show would be quite alone. But short of breaking into the gallery overnight, and perhaps sleeping in the sleeping rough room, there isn’t much of a way to test that.

Crucified By Graph Paper

The largest environment, ’Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Munster’, is the biggest break. It has no references to time or memory but instead offers a discombobulation of the human body. What might initially look like stones are statue heads, the sort of thing which often adorn church walls, but are here trapped within that wire grid. And my high-falutin’ explanation for all this is…

…okay, I haven’t got one. All I can tell you is what it feels like to look at.

With its rigid structure the wire frame is imprisoning, the heads like people caught in the gears of some soulless mechanism, crucified by graph paper. But all those open spaces are simultaneously insubstantial, like a spider’s web. Which adds to the nightmarish quality of the image, making it seem both oppressive and unchallengeable. It stakes out a space you can’t get in, while those heads can’t get out. Though the heads look stone rather than concrete, the addition of a cement mixer suggests that within that space they’re being made on some kind of production line, like a mechanical queen bee populating its hive.

FASTER THAN A SPEEDING TIMEPIECE (TIME TRAVEL AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM)

"Time... is only something we have invented for ourselves. It's a trap. I wanted to destroy that trap."
- Nicholas Roeg

“Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself.” 
- Marx

(A sort of sequel to this, though the order you read them doesn’t really matter.)

Chronic Argonauts 

There must have been a first time travel story. Even time travel has to have a starting point.

And that’s because the passage of time was originally held to be illusory, a trick caused by restricted perspective. Time isn’t really time at all, but just another dimension in space. “Second sight”, prophesying and all the rest wasn’t a form of travel but an enhanced ability to see. Another term for a shaman or a soothsayer is a seer. And the seer has an elevated viewpoint to see from, which allows him or her to see across time. It’s like we all live down in a deep valley, but they inhabit a tower. They can simply see further.

People can confuse this with predestination. But it’s not the same. Predestination presumes linear time, as if all is scripted in advance, your fate lying inexorably in wait for you like the station awaits the train. Here both time and space are part of the web of wyrd, where tugging on one part will cause waves across the rest. This is how Brian Bates had his sorcerer character Wulf explain it, in his novel ’The Way of Wyrd’ (1983):

“It is a mistake to assume that events far apart in time are thereby separate. All things are connected as in the finest web of a spider. The slightest movement on any thread can be discerned from all points in the web…

“Omens frighten the ordinary person because they believe them to be predictions of events that are bound to happen: warnings from the realm of destiny. But this is to mistake the true nature of omens. A sorcerer can read omens as pattern-pointers, from which the weaving of wyrd can be admired and from which connections between different parts of patterns can be assumed…

“There are no laws. The pattern of wyrd is like the grain in wood, or the flow of a stream; it is never repeated in exactly the same way. But the threads of wyrd pass through all things and we can open ourselves to its ripples as it passes by. When you see ripples in a pool, you know that something has dropped into the water.” 

Linear time, causal events, all arose later. Along with notions of social progress. Time travel, relying on linear time like a train needs tracks, became conceivable as a consequence of this. But whenever it was, it’s long since been lost to time. So let’s ask a more precise question – when was the first time machine story?

With time travel we’re time’s passengers, susceptible to its whims. If people crossed time it was often not through their own doing but by the whim of fate, by supernatural or just plain mysterious means. In Washington Irving’s story of Rip Van Winkle (1819) time literally runs away with him, he’s beguiled to discover years have passed in what to him was a night. In what’s become his signifying feature, even his beard has grown long. But that’s a more extreme version of an experience we all have. You have it every time you see a clock and say “what, quarter to five already?”

Which places Irving’s story in a strange interchange. It happens to Van Winkle essentially because he drinks magic mead. But he doesn’t just reappear in a later iteration of his home town, small children now adults and so on. In a much-forgotten feature, the American revolution happens in his absence. Time hasn’t just advanced, society has changed.

Things developed from there. But development is never even. Buck Rogers’ 1928 origin, for example, effectively rips off Rip Van Winkle to get its hero into the world of the future where the action is. Nevertheless, the time machine dictates to time, just as the car engine lets us dictate to space. If we have never invented an actual time machine, their fictional existence has always been linked to real contemporary levels of technology. Wells' 'The Time Machine' (1895) claimed to feature “the first of all Time Machines”, and this has since become a widespread belief. But though with ’Time Machine’ he may have coined the term, Wells himself had already written the shorter, lesser-known 'The Chronic Argonauts' (1888). And more timely still was Edward Page Mitchell, with 'The Clock That Went Backward' (1881).

As with Irving, Mitchell’s story inhabits an interchange. It’s based around a predestination paradox which enables the revolt of the Netherlands, which it strongly suggests was a precondition of American Independence – the path of progress being paved. It strongly links time travel with clocks, to the point of suggesting it could only be possible after clocks were invented.

Yet it only portrays time travel working backwards, through a clock whose two operatives are themselves elderly. (It’s said of the Aunt owner: “The old lady was surrounded by old-fashioned things. She seemed to live altogether in the past.”) And while time is only portrayed as linear, as if it has a reverse to be added to forward gear, there are also verbal hints of wyrd time: “Past, present, and future are woven together in one inextricable mesh.” Ultimately, though some pseudo-scientific explanations are offered up, it’s really a piece of weird fiction.

But it’s central feature, up there in the title, is a piece of magical thinking about technology - as if the thing that measures time could somehow also control it.

Unlike Mitchell’s august Aunt, Wells made his protagonists respectively a brilliant but remote inventor and a Victorian explorer. But there’s the same emphasis on time travel as if it were another direction in space. In ’The Time Machine’ the original working model is even described as the size of a clock. All of which reflects the increased prevalence of clocks in our lives by that point. Its controls are literally a forward and a reverse gear.

The globe had become increasingly demarcated and colonised. So, after space, time was next to fall under human dominion. The shift from agricultural to industrial work brought with it the imposition of clock time onto the working day, to a degree not previously conceived. Standardised 'railway time', co-ordinated between towns, was introduced between 1840 and 1855. The first commercial telegraph arrived in 1837, with early lines often running beside railways. By 1861 the coasts of America had been connected. But there’s more...

Eadward Muybridge's photographic motion studies had started in 1878, just before Mitchell’s story. Previously, anything moving too fast for the human eye was simply ungraspable. Cameras still couldn’t snap in such rapid succession. But by setting them up in series, triggered to click seconds apart, he found he could break actions down into analysable steps. For the first time, we could for example figure out how a horse actually ran (see above). And it turned out artistic depictions had been doing it wrong all along. The essence of time had been that it passed, a succession of moments which slipped inexorably through your fingers. Now it could be grasped, could be scrutinised.

The Royal Academy’s ‘Degas And the Ballet’ exhibition associated Impressionist art with photography, and in particular with Muybridge. This movement gained its name from Monet’s ‘Impression, Sunrise’ (1874, above). Which was itself named because, in the early morning haze, so little of the topography of the harbour could be discerned. It wasn’t a mapping of a place, but an impression of a scene. The sun didn’t light the subject, like a spotlight on a stage or table lamp above a writing desk. The sunrise and the light effects it produced, these were the subject of the work.

Colours were sometimes placed adjacently on the canvas, to mix together in the viewer’s eye, duplicating the way we perceive the real world. As said another time Monet often painted the same subject in series, at different times and under different conditions, purely to capture the changes.

This fed from twin developments. Modernism was about developing the subjective view of the artist, art’s job no longer to reflect a supposedly objective reality. But at the same time, scientific enquiry had become increasingly interested in the effect of light upon vision. Griselda Murray Brown argued:”Many of the artistic movements of the early Twentieth century were in essence an attempt to open visual art up to the dimension of time.” (’Music to the Eyes’, Art Quarterly, Summer ‘15). True, but too late. This was something which started in the late Nineteenth.

Nature had previously been thought of as timeless. Yes of course seasons passed, but as part of the eternal round. Time was circular, it simply served up more of the same. Whereas Impressionism was described as “the discovery of the present moment.” The world was no longer set, endlessly reiterating according to custom and precedent, but transitory.

Think of time as people passing you on a crowded street, a succession of moments, each with its unique character, swiftly replaced by the next. Once our activities just seemed to reproduce what had already happened, like adding another sedimentary layer to the weight of history. Now everything was happening fleetingly, for the first time, and soon to be replaced by something else. To misquote Dylan, whatever you needed to paint, you’d better paint it fast.

And Impressionism spread quickly. Pissarro recalled feeling encouraged when he first encountered Monet’s work, but always maintained he’d already been entertaining the same notions. So it may not be co-incidental that, much like Muybridge, this new approach relied on technical innovations. Earlier generations of painters had made at most preparatory sketches in situ, then knocked the painting up back in the safe confines of the studio. Now, newly built trains took the Impressionists to newly accessible country locations. And the technology that took them there also gave them new tools to depict what they saw, such as paint in portable metal tubes. Containing new manufactured paints, literally brighter than before. Those vibrant colours we all exalt in, partly they just can out of a can.

Gombrich, in ’The Story of Art’, commented “the painter was a man who could defeat the transitory nature of things, and preserve… any object for posterity”. Abandoning that to try and capture the moment was like relinquishing your main power. 

Yet it’s analogous to the way that, pre-Romanticism, few saw anything aesthetic in nature. When crossing the Alps, it was common to draw the shutters on your carriage, to keep out the awful sights. It was human technological developments which made nature seem comparatively less threatening, to the point it could be framed as a scenic view. A similar thing is true of transience. Before it could be captured, it was best not thought of. Now Monet could talk of “the instability of a universe that changes constantly under our very eyes”, not from fear but relish for the challenge.

And what happens when we apply this new concentrated sight not to nature but human society? Scientific enquiry was no longer broad in scope, like mapping a new continent, but acute – aiming to home in on something. Producers of goods had originally been independent craftsmen. Merchants were essentially their customers, even if their intent was to sell on what they bought to other customers further down the line. 

But by increments the craftsmen would fall under the employment of the merchants. Who would now supply their raw materials, own their premises and pay them at guaranteed fixed rates. In this way the relationship of worker to capitalist, which now seems so inherent to production, was first founded.

Yet there’s a twist to this. The early capitalist’s motive was to regularise supply, to maintain profits. But, lacking the producer’s craft skills, he could at most stand and watch the worker work. His control was really only over input and output. How the worker worked still lay under his own control. Gradually, mechanisation changed that.

Marx referred to this as the formal subsumption of labour by capital yielding to the actual. He wrote: “Through the subordination of humanity to the machine the situation arises in which men are effaced by their labour; in which the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives.”

Ever prescient, he was writing in 1863. But it reached it’s apogee with Taylorism, named after Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theories of ‘scientific management’, which effectively began in 1882. What Muybridge did to the horse, break a previously unanalysable blur of activity down into a discrete set of measurable steps, just a few years later Taylor was doing to the craft worker. The gestation of the production line is here. And with it time and money became inextricably entwined. Phrases like “I can’t spare the time” became common parlance. As EP Thompson said of the era: “Time is now currency, not passed but spent.” (‘Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, 1967.)

Time On Tracks

George Pal's film adaption of Wells' 'The Time Machine' (well, sort of) came out in 1960. Let’s focus here on the time travel scene itself. (Elaborated from a much briefer sequence in the novella.) The machine itself (barely described by Wells) is of course made to look deliberately quaint and Victorian, essentially an easy chair with a clock, calendar and gears attached to it. The brass plate with the manufacturer’s name is a particularly nice touch. (Even if it raises the question how an extended warranty would work.)

But it all accentuates the notion of the time machine being stationary in space, sitting still in the basement as all changes around it. Like the machine, time only has a forward and reverse gear. Time’s a direction, just a different kind of forward to the one space has. Imagine instead of reading down a page of a book you pressed through it. You’d come out at the same point on another page, further along. And where the time machine will take you is just as pre-set as skipping ahead in a book.

An earlier post looked at how the Hartnell era of ‘Doctor Who’ butted against the limits of Fordist time. What was there accentuated is here assumed.

But there’s another element… look less at the chief barometer of his travel – the shop front mannequin, with her raising and lowering hemline – than how it’s shown. Its double framed, first through his own window and then the shop window across the street. These devices are used to convey the passing of time, they happen to a character in the film. 

Yet at those points he's not really within the film at all. He's an observer. He's like a member of the audience who managed to get the most front of front row seats, but screens still separates him from the action. Pretty much every member of the 1960 audience would have seen fast-froward and time-lapse film. But pretty much all would have witnessed it passively, something that wouldn’t change until the first video recorders two decades later.

Which encounters and over-rides the most obvious objection. Of course the time travel section is simply built around the technical possibilities of the day. Fast forward film and time lapse photography was what they had. How else could they have done it? They filmed it not to convey any kind of temporal philosophy they may have conceived of, but simply in a way they could.

But the framing shows that’s the point. It’s not that these kind of technical developments constrain our perceptions. In many ways they do the opposite, enable us to see things in a new way. But by enabling they restrict them to what’s thinkable. It’s like building a road network. You can drive places you couldn’t before. But the places you can’t drive, you’re less liable to think about.

To quote Marx again: “The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary their social being that determines their consciousness.” 

And that one direction was now… well, directional. It had a forward and back. We’ve seen in the previous instalment how that related to working life. But it was equally true of our leisure pursuits. TV, for example, then had just one channel to choose from.

A Remote Control For Reality

But if linear time was a conception of the Fordist era, of a job-for-life endured on a production line, how do we tell time today? A more recent development is bullet time. Defined by Wikipedia as “a visual effect or visual impression of detaching the time and space of a camera (or viewer) from that of its visible subject.” In general, it’s used to describe two film effects at once - slow motion combined with camera pan, so we traverse moving objects as if they were effectively still.

This doesn’t necessarily have to be captured on film. Take Cornelia Parker’s 'Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View' (1991), of which she said “it’s not the explosion, it’s more the contemplation, you know, the quiet contemplation of these things in the air.” It’s hard to think of anything more reactive than an explosion. Yet here we can stand in a gallery and mull it over, even wander around it.

It could theoretically have been made at any time, all you really need are debris and string. (Plus, presumably, enough patience to assemble it.) She genuinely tried to recreate a moment from the explosion, presumably captured from some hi-res photograph. True the artwork doesn’t rely on this, just as galloping horses could be painted before Muybridge. But the work comes from a culture which has absorbed those technologies.

A more popular example would be the Centre Parcs ad which recited the WH Davies poem ’Leisure’, (1916) (“What is this life if, full of care/ We have no time to stand and stare”) as squirrels’ leaps and swans' wing-flaps are soothingly slowed down. The poem is of course a cod-Romantic chill pill, not worth examination. Its conceit is that we live a “poor life”, but the poem itself can act as medicine for this, allowing us “to stand and stare”. But what’s significant about it here is the context, it’s combination with a technical innovation. What if you could hold a remote up to life and press freeze frame, every time life gets too hectic?

However, in general use bullet time has another element. In what’s almost a reversal of Pal’s film sequence its most used to insert a character into the drama, who has the same slo-mo perspective as the viewer. A character so likely to be found dodging bullets that it became named after such a thing.

You can see an early use in the video to Roni Size and Reprazent's 1997 track 'Brown Paper Bag'. With its payphones and box TVs it may now look of its era. But then the first Matrix film was only two years later. It lacks the whiplash pan and most of the time just ‘scratches’ time back and forth like a DJ cueing vinyl, a kind of 'budget bullet time'.

But the basis is here. It sets up a busy bustling city-time, which is buffered for everyone but our hero. And he manages this by technology, by possessing a kind of remote control for reality. Which looks like a cosmic version of a Kinder egg. The key image comes and is gone in a few seconds, of a car hurtling by a traffic queue.

Imagine chronokinesis (power over time) and time travel have become distinct things. Time was once seen as the ultimate levelling measure. Exam contestants needed to be allocated the same amount of it wherever they sat, and so on. But now we have the notion that time can somehow work for you differently to the way it works on others. Time is not universally speeded or slowed, like a record played at different speeds. Time has become subjective. Yet the irony is that these impossibly fast reflexes are also those of us, the passive viewer. The protagonist is identified with us not just from their character or actions, but in a material way.

It’s the Matrix films with which bullet time is most associated. And instead of a power-granting device Neo evolves the ability to see in bullet time - just as he sees past the consensus-reality world of illusory slumber he's been in. And this becomes more literal still with Quicksilver in the X-Men films. Time constrains others, while allowing you to pass idly through it, picking its fruits. Which is underlined by his slacker character (a break from previous depictions), his ability to mix work and leisure by goofing off mid-mission. His role in the film even works like this, he’s not a full-time worker like a regular team member but a hired contractor. He's analogous to Kevin Bacon’s superior mobile connection allowing him to avoid “buffer face”, while others freeze-frame in the street.

Perhaps what’s bizarre is that a form of viewing, which is of course shared by the whole cinema audience, in this way becomes individualised. The remote control is of course not a device you have in the cinema, it’s confined to the home. This is achieved by its becoming associated with the perspective of a single character – in fact it becomes a super-power of the hero. As TV Tropes put it: “It is a convenient way to depict Super Reflexes, by allowing the audience to experience the same powers of enhanced perception that the protagonist is using.”

The Time Machine’s fast-forward worked by a lever. Yes, it took a genius inventor to create it, but now it’s built anyone could pull that lever. Davies’ poem is predicated on its curative powers for anyone who cares to read it. Roni Size had a cosmic Kinder egg. Whereas bullet time by definition divides up the frame, into those inherently endowed with chronokinetic powers and those without.

Neo-liberalism isn't sold on the notion that we can adapt to these new social conditions we find ourselves in, but that you can - that this is your chance to get ahead and leave the bewildered herd behind. The Victorians had seen time frugality and ‘industriousness’ as a form of virtue, which would benefit any who applied it to their lives. Now society is like a lottery, predicated on winners and losers. So even social conditions come to be seen as individualised, where the side we’re on is determined not by morality so much as identification. The elect few gain the perspective of bullet time against the mass still stuck in their Fordist linear time tracks.

But if that doesn't convince you, consider this. Bullet time is simultaneously a description of our modern perception of time and a registered trademark of Warner Brothers. What could be more neoliberal than that?

‘NAM JUNE PAIK’

Tate Modern, London

”Television has attacked us for a lifetime. Now we strike back.” 
- Nam June Paik, 1992

The Next Step Towards Inderminacy 

One of the many videos included with this show is a German TV documentary on the Fluxus International Festival of Newest Music in 1962. Inevitably, it takes more interest in reaction shots than the events themselves. And, affecting smug viewer camaraderie as if to say “of course you and I can see through this foolishness”, it informs us: “the audience are not quite sure. Should one keep a straight face or is one allowed to smile?”

Nam June Paik’s history involved video art, music, performance, installations, robots and more - often all at the same time. One constant was the influence of John Cage, who he met in ’58 and thereafter took to referring the years before as BC - Before Cage. In another video Cage plays his infamous silent piece on a Manhattan street. As an audience assembles he sits at the keys with absolute focus, then at the very end opens the lid. Are you allowed to laugh? Was there a serious point to it? Or is it both, impish provocation and Zen statement at the same time? He wasn’t giving anything away. And he could deadpan as well as any comic.

The thing is, Mr. Reporter man, the unanswerability of that question isn’t a failing at all. In fact it’s the very crux of the thing. You haven’t seen through. You haven’t even seen.

And a work like ‘TV Buddha’ (1974, above) works in a similar way. A Buddhist figure sits before a camera and TV screen, as if using his own as like a meditational aid. In fact, as you see yourself and other attendees caught in the screen background, the figure becomes rather like Cage in the video. It would be tempting to see in it a provocative critique, perhaps of rich Westerners with their consumerist appropriation of Buddhism. We must be allowed to smile.

But it’s equally possible no joke is intended. To use TV for this - really, why not? Being able to recognise yourself in the mirror is an early stage in overcoming infant egoism. And to get free of yourself, to see outside of your own subjectivities, is part of meditation’s aim. Cage of course was a Buddhist. And Paik seems at least semi-sympathetic, commenting “I am not a follower of Zen, but I react to Zen in the same way I react to Bach.”

Staying on the TV theme… you’ll get used to this with Paik… is ‘TV Garden’ (1974/7), where TV screen of various screen sizes and angles are made into part, possibly the fruits, of a garden. “Television is part of ecology”, he explained. And much of his work involves dissolving apparent borders - East/West (born in Korea, Paik also lived and worked in Japan, America and Germany), ancient/modern and, here, he commingles culture and nature. The work’s “like nature, which is beautiful”, he commented, “not because it changes beautifully, but simply because it changes”.

The show goes to some lengths to reconstruct his first solo exhibition, ‘Exposition of Music - Electronic Television’ in Wuppertal in 1963. But the effort is worth it. The gallery was the ground floor of a converted villa, but Paik took over the whole building - including the stairs, the basement, the garden and the private residence upstairs. Even the toilet was not immune.

Several of these works are already AC, in the sense of moving beyond Cage. With his prepared pianos Cage mostly inserted objects inside them, interfering with the hammers. The piano seemed ‘normal’, until you tried to play it. Paik attaches items until it looks like a surrealist object in its own right (above), then connects the keys to external things. One sets off a siren, another switches off the room lights, yet another turns them back on, and so on.

The audience is encouraged not to witness and privately contemplate completed art objects. But neither do they merely observe the results of chance processes, as often the case with Cage. Instead they move through a space at their own choosing, interacting with things as they come across them. Art becomes a conversation, not a recital or set speech. “As the next step towards more indeterminacy”, Paik explained, “I wanted to let the audience act and play by itself”.

When Control Was Remote (The Screen Era)

Paik was able to buy his first portable video recorder in 1965, and indeed the Sixties was the decade television technology became ubiquitous. The issues he dealt with very much of his time. But the way he saw technology… truth to tell he sometimes seemed confused.

When he insisted “the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas”, it was a Futurist statement which could have been made by Marinetti had he lived long enough. Yet at other points he seems to envisage a cultural war, with he and his cohorts as the Viet Cong waging guerrilla combat against the mighty tech giants. Though even here technology seems something like Patty Hearst, born into privilege but always yearning to be liberated by the other side. Even when he worked with the tech sector, such as at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, there’s a sense of him going undercover behind enemy lines.

For example, the video installation ’Nixon’ (1965, above) is almost a literalisation of culture jamming. Two TV images of Nixon are distorted by magnetic coils. Like Burroughs’ writing it suggests that the mass media is less an outright fiction than a distortion of reality. So by scrambling it, by distorting the distortion further, we decode it into telling the truth. As well as the obvious political reading, it seems connected to the sound distortions often used by psychedelic music of this era, when only shortly before the studio had merely tried to imitate a ‘live’ sound.

Yet in this conflict, if not contradiction, he proved a microcosm of his era. In the social upsets of the late Sixties, crowds would chant “the whole world’s watching.” There was a tendency to see the same generational shift in technology as with people. Radio involved a reporter telling you what he saw, while with TV you saw it all yourself. Mass media was inherently liberating, flowing across borders until it corroded them, levelling old hierarchies.

But at the same time one of the famous Parisian agitational posters framed the state broadcaster with the phrase “the enemy speaks to us at 6pm”. The Situationist writer Guy Debord declared “everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation”. Even John Lennon, star of the new media, commented how they “keep you doped with religion and sex and TV.”

And we’re not done yet with those era-embracing contradictions. After an earlier Tate show, I argued much Sixties art fell into a chalk-and-cheese divide between Conceptualism and Fluxus. Paik was officially a member of Fluxus, participating in their events. During which he’d undress and smear himself with toothpaste while playing the Moonlight Sonata… you know, that sort of thing. 

Fluxus was originally called ‘Neo Dada’, and Paik’s texts and publicity have that Dada roughness, pasted down at irregular angles, sometimes over a seemingly unconnected background, bulletins from the front line. And that extemporisation contrasts creatively with his interest in technology. Which we tend to assume will arrive in our lives all sleek and shiny, like a UFO landing. Technology is seen as just another manifestation of high culture, another mystification to challenge and overthrow. For example ’Robot-K456’ (1964, below) was, in the show’s words, “designed as an intentionally shoddy human figure”, to dispel such sci-fi allure.

Fluxus took up Dada’s desire to shock. For it’s first performance, 'Robot K-456’ played the Kennedy inaugural address while shitting white beans. But it also channelled another element of Dada too often overlooked. In its antipathy to high culture, it sought to bring back play. Audience participation doesn’t come across as a lofty ideal, where people are exhorted not to passively sit there supping up the capitalist system of agglomeration, but imbibed with an infectious sense of involvement. To misquote an old ad - overthrowing commodity culture, let’s pretend it’s fun.

Which relates to another art movement of the era. There’s a vitrine of objects from Paik’s studio, which includes Buddhist figures alongside toy plastic robots. And this eclecticism, this magpie collecting of images and shaking up of signs until the effect is culturally levelling, is very Pop Art.

‘Family of Robots’ (1986, example above) for example, were made from working TVs. The grandparents came from vintage equipment, then down to the children composed out of the latest models. It’s reminiscent of the <i>‘Simpsons’</i> scene where Bart insists of hugging the TV instead of Homer, as “it’s done more to raise me than you have”. We are now effectively made of TV technology, its images imprinted on our brains. It’s a similar theme to the Scottish Pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi, if different in execution. And it’s also similar to Paolozzi in never forgetting, in fact revelling, in the way that robots are considered a suitable toy for children.

Then at other times Paik would come up with something like ’Three Eggs’ (1975), in which an egg is filmed and shown on a monitor. Another nearby monitor then has its screen removed, and a real egg inserted…. you get it? This slightly tiresome formal game seems much closer to Conceptualism.

Conceptual art had a dryness it often used as a means of staging absurd jokes deadpan, the better to get its foot in gallery settings. But counter to Fluxus, it tended to relish that dryness, the difficulty, the withholding of aesthetic appeal. True, Fluxus could venture too far over to the playful side of the dial, and become unfocused and self-indulgent - nothing more than bohemian antics, something to do until you grow out of it. Whereas Conceptualism could be too cool, too cerebral, to get anyone riled up enough to change anything. In an era where Jimi Hendrix was setting light to guitars and protesters were levitating the Pentagon it could clamour for attention. 

Someone needed to mix the two up, to get the porridge just right. There are points Paik manages this, but there’s others where he can’t keep up the balancing act. At times he’s found falling into one camp, at others into the other.

No Failure Like Success 

The Tate partly sells this show through his “profound influence on today’s art and culture”. (And see their video, embedded below.) True enough, back in ’74 he predicted “the electronic superhighway”, and asked “do you know how soon artists will have their own TV channels?”

But if some art has proved prophetic, so what? Were that all there was to it, you wouldn’t need to know about Paik any more than you’d need to know about Ade Lovelace to operate your laptop. We don’t want art to predict the next iPhone feature, in fact we don’t want art that merely predicts at all. We want art to raise challenging questions, to critique seeming certainties, to rub up against culture not contribute to it.

When Paik put on his first show in Germany, the most wealthy country in Europe had two TV channels. Mass media was closer to the ‘his master’s voice model’, where the voices of the few were funnelled to the many. An act as simple as offering interaction then seemed radical. And the very technology which enabled TV technology was slowly but surely subjecting it to challenge. Like the still camera before it, the TV camera slowly became both more portable and more affordable.

However, as you watch attendees photographing and filming what are already video works, that’s clearly not the world we live in. We generate the content we consume, we even do it while consuming. But that doesn’t mean DIY culture has triumphed. It means our behaviour has been factored into the new business mode and monetised.

In the Observer, Bidisha found this “a story about the radical 60s generation segueing into the yuppie era.” And like others of that generation, Paik was so successful he inevitably became a victim of that success. Truth to tell, he became one of those people always telling you how futuristic the future will be, until you learn to spot him coming.

In 1984 he became associated with first world-wide satellite broadcast, titled ‘Good Morning Mister Orwell’, intended to mix high art and “popular entertainment”. (Including, risibly, the Thompson twins.) ’Internet Dreams’ (1993, above) is a video wall. We might want to associate this with reversal of perspective. We’re no longer the object, the viewed, the dot among many other dots stuck on the map. We’re now the subject, the viewer. Perhaps even stroking a white cat.

One of the many recurrences of this image is Moore and Gibbons’ celebrated comic 'Watchmen’, where Ozymandias meta-reads a bank of screens like a scrying glass, and so divines the immediate future. But what do we do when we come across this? Of course we channel-surf. Just like we do at home with one screen and a button.

If there was anything valuable to learn here it would be that no magic transfers from sitting in that exalted position, that there’s no super-sighted elite who hatch mater-plans, that those who place themselves above us are at least as clueless as we are. But that’s not the response we’re being prompted for.

Paik had said in 1969 “the real issue is not to make another scientific toy, but to humanise the technology”. We now know all too well that satellite TV just made broadcasting broader, that more screens was merely a quantitive not a qualitative change. It did nothing to disrupt, reverse or humanise the technology.

But worst of wall was James Fox’s BBC4 series ’The Age of the Image’ which said of his video installation ‘Sistine Chapel’ (1993) “it really does capture what it was like to belong to the MTV generation”. You know what else did that? MTV did. And MTV was shit.

On the other hand, this may be seeing it the wrong way up. In his Standard review, Matthew Collings recounts how he had only known Paik through his later work, which he found soporific, and found this show to transform his understanding. That, not ’Internet Dreams’, is the reversal of perspective to pull. Focus on the good stuff.

Paik was like a cross between Babbage and Dr. Frankenstein, extemporising at the limits of possibility. It’s like the well-known story of the BBC Radiophonics Workshop. In their early days they’d spend hours cobbling together unique and entirely unreliable contraptions, that unreliability often being the thing that made them unique. In later years they could just order kit from a catalogue, and they sounded like it. Paik failed by succeeding. He may have been fated to fail, given his time and his interests. But that doesn’t mean the only lessons he has for us are negative ones.

FORT PROCESS/ HUGO TICCIATI'S 'LOOPING TIME' (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

FORT PROCESS
Newhaven Fort, Sat 22nd Sept



So happily, perhaps the only music and sound art festival to be held in a Napoleonic fort got a sequel. (Actually a second sequel, alas I gormlessly missed the first occurrence.) Again it promised to “cover the cornerstones of improv, experiments, dance and noise”. With multiple events going on simultaneously, I can only concentrate on a few highlights here. Someone else’s path might not have crossed mine at all.



Most accounts I read from the last event focused on how brilliantly inappropriate it was for such an event to take over a venue based around war defences. Perhaps “make weirdo music not war” could be its slogan. But as I watched a sound installation emit spectral bleeping from the fort’s ramparts(‘Arpeggi’ by Mike Blow, handily pictured) I think I find it more splendidly appropriate.

Perhaps I just spent too much of my seventies youth watching ’Doctor Who’ and the like. But those were the days when budgets for location shooting stretched no further than Surrey, while the Radiophonic Workshop was at the show’s disposal. So the alien was often conceived of as a sonic aesthetic, strange sounds that required decoding. While the military provided the role of controlling parents, locking the weird away from us, causing us to seek it out. (Perhaps significantly, another of Blow’s installations, ’Arpeggi’, “uses hacked ex-military hardware to create music.”)



Many installations worked interactively, as what Blow called “automatic music”, collaborating with either the audience or the venue. In Adam Bastana’s ’A Room Listening To Itself’ (also handily pictured) microphones were arranged radially, to pick up from speakers. To add some audience involvement I lightly tapped one speaker, to hear a drum roll slowly spread round the room.

At other times it was the other way, the venue seemed to interpret the work for you. The sub lows of Disinformation’s ’National Grid’ were smartly located in the deep Caponier tunnels. So, while the indicia spoke of links between the grid network and the human body, I thought more of the echoes and resonances in caves which are supposed to have stimulated the first human music.

Maria Marzaioli’s ’PWM’ used four audio loops culled from improvisations. With each loop of a different length, new combinations were constantly being created. But, particularly with the use of recognisable instruments, it was almost impossible not to listen to as a ‘real’ quartet. This time the work may have influenced the setting. For I found the sound bleed (particularly between the indoor works), not distracting but enhancing of the overall effect - as if the whole festival became one meta sound art work.

The programme described Ore as the “originator of the truly singular genre Tuba Doom”. Ah, those genre tags always start off as a gag! But give it six months and at a gig you’ll run into some bozo insisting he was into Tuba Doom before anyone else. In fact, he will probably turn out to be me.

Wandering, soaking stuff up, I stumbled upon their set mid-way. A tuba and trombone player were working just slightly out of time with one another, creating an enticingly ‘bent’ effect. Already pretty minimal, that actually proved the dynamic centre of the piece as they shifted into unison for the finale. It seemed forever half-emerging out of drone, as if something shifting into view. Minimalist in the Morton Feldman sense, where the sombre meets with the serene. If music like this doesn’t progress much, it’s because it marinades. Like a fermenting spirit its taste becomes stronger and stronger.

Franco-Finnish trio Ritual Extra were similarly minimal, in fact so slow to start you wondered if they’d resolved to play only for the super-patient. (Compared to these guys, the Necks plunge straight into the deep end.) Luckily, the wait was worth it. The drummer struck his cymbals softly but so rapidly as to produce a shimmering tone. While an acoustic guitar took up a more percussive role, strumming and thwacking, as clear-voiced folk chanting sailed across the both of them.

The absolute absence of any performance element was striking, each person’s movements economically concerned only with playing. The singer sat stock still, gazing into the middle distance, shifting only his mouth.

Alas this time I missed the ending, heading off as I was to see Rhys Chatham. Who marks a different strand of Minimalism again. Having previously worked with La Monte Young, Tony Conrad and Glenn Branca, tonight he was playing alongside only himself. In ’Pythagorean Dreams’, he’d switch between guitar, flute and some kind of mini-trumpet, looping down layers of himself as he went. The effect was rather like that game where you keep placing one hand atop another, ceaselessly giving off the effect of building up to some crescendo. Minimalist and musically rich at one and the same time.

I romantically imagined each loop had some in-built half-life, so nothing decayed away but each new element added to the expanding richness of the underlying sonic loam. He was probably just fading them down himself as he went, but that’s what I liked to think.



I’d watched some vidclips of AJA (above) before the day, which at the time I dismissed as “just a performance”. And true, her noise electronica is serviceable but bog-standard beat-bashing. (Certainly nothing to compare with Ewa Justka’s merciless intensity from the last event.) But, when you see it live, you can only conclude - what a performance! This time rather than work with the setting her act burst beyond its confines. Despite playing in a small and crowded room, lacking even the most basic stage, she came on as if she had Iggy Pop in her blood.

Noise music is notoriously for being ‘manpainy’. Think of the characteristic hunched pose under hoodie and over microphone. By way of cheery contrast, AJA sports - and fully inhabits - the most outrageously flamboyant costumes, from which she engages fully with the audience. After Tuba Doom perhaps we’ve hit on another new genre - Glam Noise.

In may day, women would often tell each other the expression “nothing better than having a good cry”. Yet of course there’s something better, and her whole act seems intent on proving the inherent value in having a good scream. So, despite all the volume, or more likely because of it, it’s a wholly uplifting experience to witness. The programme described her act as “cathartic”, not a word they were using in vain. And in this day and age, it’s often appealing to discover something where you do have to be there, which isn’t YouTubeable.

Overall Fort Process is one of those labours of love and (the right kind of) lunacy, put on by afficionados for afficionados, just to see the thing happen. It’s proof corporate crap hasn’t colonised the whole of our lives just yet.

Photo of AJA from the event’s website, other snaps mine. More where they came from here.

Some proper photos from Agata Urbaniak here

Last time I managed to post a video of the previous event. So let’s keep that tradition up…



‘LOOPING TIME’ BY HUGO TICCIATI + O/MODERNT CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Kings Place, London, Fri 21st Sept



This concert, part of the Time Unwrapped season, focused on string-based Minimalist music.

‘Shaker Loops’ (1978) , while an early work of John Adams’, is regarded as something of a classic, and rightly so. It contains many Minimalist elements, including a basis in a pulsing beat and an ability to keep things simple. In the second movement, a double bass plucks at a solitary string at regular intervals.

Yet, perhaps in retrospect, it’s easy to hear how he was already moving into Post-Minimalism. An earlier version in Adams’ own words “crashed and burned”, partly because it restricted itself to a string quartet. Adams responded by ramping up the number of players, first to a septet and (as performed here) a full string orchestra - “thereby adding a sonic mass and the potential for more acoustical power.”

But rather than Post-Minimalist it should be thought of as Just Romantic Enough. The reference to the Shakers, a religious group from the American Pioneer days, already gives the music more of specificity than normally found in Minimalism. What amounts to a violin solo appears midway. It very much builds to a climax, even though it continues from there and ends somewhere much closer to the beginning.

And what could be more Romantic than imitation of nature? Adams has said himself the first movement in particular was inspired by the rippling of water, the surface refracting the sunlight caught by those amassed shimmering strings.

But ultimately, as is typical of him, Adams makes the unlikely combination virtuous. Much like nature, the piece belies our constructed notions of what’s simple and what’s complex and involved.

Angel’s Share by the Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tuur, was a UK premiere. As anyone who’s seen the Ken Loach film knows, the title refers to the amount of whiskey which evaporates during distilling.

The piece is full of ideas, and has some great sections. It opens etherially, with the violins and violas creating the most disembodied sounds. Quite late on, it suddenly breaks out into a folk dance rhythm. Yet overall it didn’t hold together. I found it kept slowly losing my interest, then doing something to suddenly grab it back, only to lose it again a short while later.

While the other three composers were still with us, Perotin’s ’Viderunt Omnes’ stems from the Twelfth Century. The ensemble entered from all four corners of the auditorium already playing, and segued surprisingly neatly into Philip Glass’s Third Symphony.

Symphonies may be antithetical to the strictures of high Minimalism, and indeed Glass didn’t embark on any until the Nineties when he was already leaving that behind. (This was composed in 1995.) It does make a good companion piece to ’Shaker Loops’, there’s even a violin lead in the third movement. (The programme uses Classical terms, such as “chaconne”, which I don’t claim to understand.)

But it remains a blend rather than a break, Glass finding a sweet spot where Minimalist mantras combine with rich and resonant melodies. And the Minimalist spirit may be retained most in it’s unhurried pace, creating something stately without any pomp.

FORT PROCESS FESTIVAL

Music-and-sound-art-festival-held-in-fort attending adventures (part of a series)

Newhaven Fort, East Sussex, Sat 3rd Sept

So one night I happen to be watching a documentary on Miyazaki making 'The Wind Rises'. Or more specifically on how he was motivated by the contradictory feelings of being avowedly anti-war while attracted to the aesthetics of militarism. And of course back in the day I was attending antinuclear marches while almost simultaneously listening to industrial music, pretty much militarism for the ears. So I knew the feeling.

And what do I do the very next day but attend (and I quote) “an expansive multi-disciplinary music and arts festival held in the evocative spaces of Newhaven Fort in East Sussex”?

All those stories which reached us from the continent, of people squatting old Car War bunkers to turn them into venues, this must be the nearest to that I've seen. Except it didn't just repurpose the fort but take advantage of it's layout, take it's nest of nooks and crannies and create a spontaneous sound art happening around every corner. Despite it being a mere half hour ride from Brighton I'd never been to the place before. Which made the experience only the richer as I ascended ramparts, descended vertiginous stairwells and traversed corridors so narrow as to resemble some strange Surrealist film set.

There was a programme but in true festival spirit it seemed more appropriate to drift, trusting to run into something you weren't expecting, following the sound trails like some Pied Piper child. At one point, following sounds along a long underground tunnel I eventually realised that rather than some act lying tantalisingly ahead of me they were coming from a string of hidden speakers. I'd gone from Pied Piper child to White Rabbit chaser! (When I did get to the end there was some woman reading earnest poetry while naked. You don't win 'em all...)

The choice of setting was doubly inspired. Music venues are built around old showbiz schematics which map relatively easy to rock and pop music, so we normally don't think to question such basics as darkened auditoriums and spotlit stages. But music such as this comes from a wholly other tradition, which works its magic better in a wholly other environment.

And improvised music (which much of this line-up was) is always site-specific, always based around the mood of the moment and the acoustic properties of the space. I certainly shan't forget Inwards emitting electronica from inside a bunker, viewable only through a narrow slit like the world's most secure DJ booth, while we musical eavesdroppers hung out oustide.

The day was a mix-up of performances, film showings and sound installations. The amount of stuff on offer made for almost an embarassment of riches, and I did find myself passing through the installations rather than letting them sink in, keen not to miss the next happening – resulting in their playing something of a second fiddle.

But at the same time there was an appealing absence of any neat dividing line between installations and performances. For example Alice and Luuma's Self-resonating Feedback Cellos (handily pictured) was “a durational droneduet for elctro-acoustically modifed cellos and no cellists”, essentially self-perpetuating cello feedback. While Hakarl's eight hour performance was in it's way an installation which merely used live musicians rather than mechanisms. As the string trio played slow and repetitive lines from inside a gun emplacement, making for a surprisingly natural auditorium, I watched a passanger ferry slowly emerge over the horizon and pull into town – it seemed part of the thing. (I also liked the way one player sported a Taylor Swift T-shirt.)

Seijiro Murayama's set was a classic case, as it would not have worked so well in a more standard setting. The bare lighting, the way we casually sat around him on the floor matched his stripped-down performance – one drum, one cymbal and one voice. He'd often pause unhurriedly between sections, eyes remaining closed, unconcerned with providing a steady flow of entertainment, doing merely what he was moved to do. I know I always say this stuff is analagous to shamanic ritual. But honestly, I say it because it's true!

There were a couple of acts I found disappointing. Of course there were the inevitable outbreaks of frenetic jazz rock and the like, but as there were multiple opportunities at any one time I just made my way elsewhere. I mean here stuff I sought out, then felt afterwards I'd backed the wrong horse. (And remember I was mostly avoiding stuff I'd seen before, feeling the day was about encountering something new.)

I was keen to see Audrey Chen again, after her enthralling set at Colour Out of Space. (Now some seven years ago!) In that time she's ditched the cello and now relies only on her voice. Perhaps tonsils are simply an easier item to pack, when travelling from one international festival to another. And the sounds she could conjour from those vocal chords, with no need for effects or filters... it was impressive. But those possessed-sounding voices have become something of a genre of their own, while the cello gave her something more unique. Best points were when she sounded the possessed version of a soul singer.

I was equally eager to see Carla Bosulich, and equally disappointed. While I can't claim to know her music well I like it when I hear it – like bluesy songwriting and lo-fi freakery got double-booked but somehow managed to get along. Like a more volume, less laid back Califone. Here, for the first half of her set she kneeled over a guitar which she scraped with found objects while pressing pedals. The second half grew more song-based, marked by her throwing back her hoodie and even taking to her feet. But the result was rather neither-nor, like whichever half we were in was the wrong one – too loose followed by too constrained. It was too much like what a rock star does when they're not doing a set-list set.

But more happily and more often, I stumbled across other things I previously knew not of and was wowed by. John Chantler's electronica set was something like a chauffeur-driven rollercoaster ride, being expertly taken through the most vertigious twists and turns. I especially liked the way he'd skid in and out of beats. Too often when electronica artists turn to beats it's like the fun stuff is over, and the set becomes constrained within their tramlines. Whereas Chantler was their master, not their servant.

When you watch electronica artists hunched behind a line of jack leads, they can seem as remote and arcane as sorcerers casting secret spells. Conversely Pierre Bastien (also handily pictured) took the 'demystifying' approach of the post-punk days in a new direction. He'd built a meccano construction, projected up on the screen above him, around which he'd loop tapes. He'd play along while triggering samples, often accompanied by a video of their making. His enthused stage persona was part mad scientist part children's entertainer, infusing music-making not just with the sense of accessibility but of fun.

At the other extreme, Ewa Justka was lit only by the glare of a flashing white light. She emitted a fusion of electronic noise and dance music for the end of time, the pumping beats giving a discipline over the usual self-indulgent howlaround. By fortuitous scheduling she followed some dippy New Age act, less like night following day than truth winning out over platitudes. In fact as the set went on I came to think of it almost as an antidote and corrective to the blissed-out all-hold-hands feelgood of dance music, uniting us all but by pulverizing us into our constituent atoms. Remarkably, she was able to keep the sonic onslaught up for some forty-five minutes without losing any of it's impact. We staggered out and somehow got the train home.

More of my photos of the day over on Flickr.

You can see photos of the Fort in all it's at the event's website.

A brief write-up and some cool photos of the events at Cutlasses.

That set by Seijiro Murayama...

...and Ewa Juska, though from Warsaw...

… while this short film's of the predecessor event. Which alas I didn't attend, but gives you a good flavour...